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Friday, January 29, 2016

﻿ How to Understand White Male Terrorism

Powerful piece by Max Berger. Here's where anti-racist education should be able to make a big difference. Select quotes from within:

﻿The
emergence of fascism has always depended upon democracy’s failure. The
growing proto-fascist, white-supremacist movement in the Republican
Party is preying upon non-rich white people who are literally dying of despair,
turning to drugs and suicide to deal with a reality they can’t bear,
and a society they believe doesn’t care for them. Over the past 15
years, the death rate for white men has actually increased — an
unprecedented rise in modern times that’s comparable to the emergence of
the AIDS epidemic. White people are right that they are under
attack — they’re just pointing to the wrong culprits. For the wealthy
elite who fund the political operatives and media companies that tell
white people who to blame for their plight, the race war is a very
useful substitute for the class war. I
have come to believe the fears of white Americans are really just
reflections of the things that white supremacy and empire have done to
others. White America has not been terrorized by people of color; we
have terrorized people of color. Black wealth is not based on stealing
from white people; white wealth is based on stealing from black people.
Instead of confronting the reality of our history and what our country
has become for most people, too many Americans would rather kill those
mourning their dead and send orphans and widows to a hellscape we
created — all in order to preserve the myths of whiteness, masculinity,
and empire.

﻿I
have to imagine the white men who commit these egregious acts of terror
do so out of a silent, personal fear that the myths of whiteness and
masculinity engender in themselves. The dehumanization white
supremacists perpetrate on others has to be, in part, a projection of
the dehumanization they feel themselves. The sad men that hang out on
4chan plotting the destruction of innocent others don’t believe they can
be the strong, virile, white male dominators they are prescribed to be.
No one who feels good about themselves talks as much as Donald Trump
does about how he is a “winner” and other people are “losers.” No one
who is confident of their humanity would deny acceptance to a 5-year-old orphan refugee.

And yet, these white, American men are taught they must be silent
in considering their fear, because to even admit they feel it would be
to undo the myths of whiteness and masculinity they cling to.

We’ve been here before, and we know that violent
backlash is at its fiercest when movements for racial and gender
justice are winning.

November 30, 2015

Police lead suspected shooter
Dylann Roof, 21, into the courthouse in Shelby, North Carolina, June 18,
2015. Roof, a 21-year-old with a criminal record, is accused of killing
nine people at a Bible-study meeting in a historic African-American
church in Charleston, South Carolina. (Reuters / Jason Miczek)